My Wife and I loved the first two Alien flicks. We probably watch them 3-4 times a year. Predator too.
But…
Somebody needs to come up with a new monster.
Alien 3 was good (had the best lines of the three certainly) but 4 sucked donkey nard.
Hard.
On a side note, did the aliens use echolocation? The lack of external eyes and the shape of the forehead (rather dolphin-like) seems to suggest it.
In the associated comics and books, does the Xenomorph species ever make sense? (And “Xenomorph” is just as generic a term as “Alien”; does their species have an actual name?) Do they only exist to be scary monsters?
The Predators, at least, are believable culturally; our own planet has had cultures that considered themselves quite civilized and moral, but with respectable gents who liked to go to exotic lands and kill the most formidable species there.
From what I remember at some point somewhere, the Aliens were designed as a living weapon. Their speciation (probably not a word) doesn’t need to make sense - they’re disposable weapons designed for a huge interspecies war.
The guy in the crashed ship in Aliens - you do see him, he has a head like an elephant - was probably their version of a military truck driver dropping off a load of weapons.
Besides, the Aliens may not be all that bad - if you’re from the species that built them, and they’ve been hard coded to not attack your species.
-Joe
That was Alien, not Aliens. Just sayin’…
Yeah, but if he made a major security situation out of it then Administration steps in and there’s no special rights for anyone.
In the original Alien, there is some indication that the Wayland-Yutani corporation had an idea about what was on that planet before they sent the Nostromo to check it out. The company likely had secret records about the Xenomorphs going back to Bishop Wayland’s encounter as chronicled in AVP.
One of the Marines on the Sulaco refered to it as a Xenomorph, presumably using it as a generic term for an alien as they didn’t know what it was. It just stuck with the fans after that.
I always assumed it was a reference to its abilities. It’s an alien that ‘morphs’ it’s biology to fit whatever environment the host came from. Or perhaps the fact it has several metamorphic stages before it’s an adult. Either explanation works for me.
It’s Greek. xeno = strange, morph = form. A strange or unknown creature.
It wasn’t ‘one of’ the marines, it was the pretentious, green Lt. who would’ve gotten them all killed if Ripley didn’t have more balls in her underpants than he had in full combat dress.
Elephant-head dude had his torso burst open from the inside so it seems they weren’t coded not to attack their creators. Assuming he actually was one of them.
Wikipedia gives they’re actual name as “Internecivus raptus” (from the Quadrilogy box set) however I seem to recall in the comics it was something different, in Aliens Apocalypse: The Destroying Angels it was Linguafoeda acheronsis.
The origins depend on what’s considered canon I think, I know that in Aliens: Genocide (the actual Novel, not sure about the Graphic Novel) Ripley ends up going to the home planet to try and kill them the gravity is about twice Earth normal and they seem to be a naturally evolved silicon based lifeform.
In Female War* though it’s speculated that they’re actually bioengineered, possibly by the Elephant headed aliens as seen in Alien, as the ultimate form of warfare eg; send down a queen and wait for them to have cleansed the planet.
*It’s odd to get the two conflicting stories about the creation when these two books were released as a single omnibus edition 
Kind of a shitty weapon don’t you think? They are extremely dangerous to handle, impossible to contain and once you’ve unleashed them on a planet, it’s now infested and completely useless to the invador.
Same thing could be said of Beserkers/Doomsday Machines; Law of Unintended Consequences comes up and bites you in the ass (literally, in the case of Aliens).
Perhaps the aliens have a biological off-switch built in by their creators. like a virus that signals them to all shut down (i.e. die) when the planet is cleared.
Or, maybe they just don’t care about the planet at all. It’s cleansed, your enemy is dead, why give a rat’s patootie about their homeworld when you can move on to the next hunk of rock? Maybe they only live in space. Maybe they release the aliens to cover their backs.
Or maybe I read way too much science-fiction.
Naaaaaah.
Well, if it bleeds, we should be able to kill it.
Fanwank:
Maybe they had some sort of chemical/biological weapon that they could use to neutralize the population once everything was dead?
Actually I have to agree that they’re not the best weapon for taking over a planet you want to colonise, but on one that you really don’t give a crap about they’d be excellent assuming you can stop any interplanetary traffic coming from the target.
I don’t remember if I read this somewhere or not now, but I could have sworn it was implied - maybe in one of the comics - the Predators assisted in the creation and dissemination of the Aliens specifically to be a perfect form of prey.
Implied…or implode?
Hmmm… good points 
But, you’d not have any worry about them getting off planet, they’re just animals, right?
Right?
I would say that Aliens are an IDEAL way of taking over a planet you want to colonize, provided you have a foolproof way of wiping out the Aliens after they’ve done their work. After all, Aliens don’t go after infrastructure or hoard gold or anything like that – they just go after large living beings and use them as hosts and/or kill them. After the host population is gone and the Aliens exterminated, you have all of the planets resources/infrastructure still available to you, with nobody left alive to fight you over it. Very nice.
Furthermore, if the Aliens ARE genetically engineered weapons, it’s reasonable to assume that some sort of built in delimiter kills them off – say, after X number of generations all the queens die out, shortly after, all the other Aliens do. Then you just sweep up the corpses and move in.
You can even align this with levdrakon’s fanwank and say the Predators discovered a remnant population of Aliens that for some reason didn’t get wiped out and bred them as prey.